Teaching safety skills to high school students with moderate disabilities.

High-schoolers with moderate intellectual disability learned to handle broken glass safely. The team used behavioral skills training: explain, model, practice, and praise. First they rehearsed with fake broken dishes. Then they practiced with real shards in the school kitchen.

Researchers tracked three skills: stop, get help, and discard safely. They measured each skill across students using a multiple-baseline design.

All students mastered the three safety steps after the BST package. Skills rose only after training started, showing clear control. Some students kept the skills weeks later, but maintenance was uneven.

Crosbie (1993) ran a direct replication the next year. The same BST package boosted social skills in deaf children with language delays. Together the two studies show the method works for different goals and diagnoses.

Bergstrom et al. (2012) later used BST to teach children with autism to seek help when lost in stores. Both papers show brief BST creates real-world safety skills, but Ryan’s team saw stronger generalization to new settings.

Ledbetter-Cho et al. (2021) also taught safety with BST, yet their preschoolers with autism first over-used the response, even with police. They added extra discrimination training. The 1992 high-schoolers did not show this overgeneralization, likely because their task was simpler: only handle broken glass.

You can teach sharp-object safety in one or two class periods. Start with fake materials, then real ones, and give plenty of praise. Check maintenance each month and re-train if needed. The same BST script also works for other safety goals like help-seeking or abduction prevention, just add discrimination probes if the response could be used wrongly.